Purple Hibiscus

is a childhood nickname that stuck.” Jaja was on his knees. He wore only a pair of denim shorts, and the muscles on his back rippled, smooth and long like the ridges he weeded.
    “When he was a baby, all he could say was Ja-Ja. So everybody called him Jaja,” Aunty Ifeoma said. She turned to Jaja and added, “I told your mother that it was an appropriate nickname, that you would take after Jaja of Opobo.”
    “Jaja of Opobo? The stubborn king?” Obiora asked.
    “Defiant,” Aunt Ifeoma said. “He was a defiant king.”
    “What does defiant mean, Mommy? What did the king do?” Chima asked. He was in the garden, doing something on his knees, too, although Aunty Ifeoma often told him “
Kwusia
, don’t do that” or “If you do that again, I will give you a knock.”
    “He was king of the Opobo people,” Aunty Ifeoma said, “and when the British came, he refused to let them control all the trade. He did not sell his soul for a bit of gunpowder like the other kings did, so the British exiled him to the West Indies. He never returned to Opobo.” Aunt Ifeoma continued watering the row of tiny banana-colored flowers that clustered in bunches. She held a metal watering can in her hand, tilting it to let the water out through the nozzle. She had already used up the biggest container of water we fetched in the morning.
    “That’s sad. Maybe he should not have been defiant,” Chima said. He moved closer to squat next to Jaja. I wondered if he understood what “exiled” and “sold his soul for a bit of gunpowder” meant. Aunty Ifeoma spoke as though she expected that he did.
    “Being defiant can be a good thing sometimes,” Aunty Ifeoma said. “Defiance is like marijuana—it is not a bad thing when it is used right.”
    The solemn tone, more than the sacrilege of what she said, made me look up. Her conversation was with Chima and Obiora, but she was looking at Jaja.
    Obiora smiled and pushed his glasses up. “Jaja of Opobo was no saint, anyway. He sold his people into slavery, and besides, the British won in the end. So much for the defiance.”
    “The British won the war, but they lost many battles,” Jaja said, and my eyes skipped over the rows of text on the page. How did Jaja do it? How could he speak so easily? Didn’t he have the same bubbles of air in his throat, keeping the words back, letting out only a stutter at best? I looked up to watch him, to watch his dark skin covered with beads of sweat that gleamed in the sun. I had never seen his arm move this way, never seen this piercing light in his eyes that appeared when he was in Aunty Ifeoma’s garden.
    “What happened to your little finger?” Chima asked. Jaja looked down, too, as if he were just then noticing the gnarled finger, deformed like a dried stick.
    “Jaja had an accident,” Aunty Ifeoma said, quickly. “Chima, go and get me the container of water. It is almost empty, so you can carry it.”
    I stared at Aunty Ifeoma, and when her eyes met mine, I looked away. She knew. She knew what had happened to Jaja’s finger.
    When he was ten, he had missed two questions on his catechism test and was not named the best in his First Holy Communion class. Papa took him upstairs and locked the door. Jaja, in tears, came out supporting his left hand with his right, and Papa drove him to St. Agnes hospital. Papa was crying, too, as he carried Jaja in his arms like a baby all the way to the car. Later, Jaja told me that Papa had avoided his right hand because it is the hand he writes with.
    “This is about to bloom,” Aunt Ifeoma said to Jaja, pointingat an ixora bud. “Another two days and it will open its eyes to the world.”
    “I probably won’t see it,” Jaja said. “We’ll be gone by then.”
    Aunty Ifeoma smiled. “Don’t they say that time flies when you are happy?”
    The phone rang then, and Aunty Ifeoma asked me to pick it up, since I was closest to the front door. It was Mama. I knew something was wrong right away, because it was Papa who always placed the call. Besides, they did not call in the afternoon.
    “Your father is not here,” Mama said. Her voice sounded nasal, as if she needed to blow her nose. “He had to leave this morning.”
    “Is he well?” I asked.
    “He is well.” She paused, and I could hear her talking to Sisi. Then she came back to the phone and said that yesterday soldiers had gone to the small, nondescript rooms that served as the offices of the
Standard
. Nobody knew how they had